Jim Al-Khalili's Quantum Biology Conference, Videos of talks, IAS Surrey 2012
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
BBC 4 is currently airing Jim's 4 part Science Documentary on Biology exploiting Quantum Weirdness.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04v85cj/the-secrets-of...
- sources to come (mobile)
(2009) "Quantum biology? Tunneling in enzymes" Over the past two decades the possibility of quantum tunneling of protons in enzymes has attracted considerable attention. (See for example a piece in Nature by Philip Ball (my favourite science writer) or the proceedings of a meeting at the Royal Society
The observed large kinetic isotope effects and their temperature dependence are inconsistent with semi-classical transition state theory,
http://condensedconcepts.blogspot.com/2009/07/quantum-biolog...
PS: This post ended with I align myself with the skeptics, but it's hardly a new idea.
http://www.cchem.berkeley.edu/jukgrp/klinman_group/Research....
I like the authors opening point "Therefore, an important challenge for the growing field of quantum effects in biomolecules is to clearly identify which quantum features with no classical counterpart may manifest in these systems and how they may influence the process of interest."
What's going to be really fun to find is biological systems which naturally exploit efficient quantum processes (tunneling, coherence, or otherwise) to help cells do their thing. This is a nice step on that road.
Random searches on terms bring up a lot of stuff, but it takes time to evaluate everything. On the other hand, I'm already up to speed on the state of the art in protein chemistry, and I'm not seeing strong physical evidence from experimentalists supporting this.
I find it pretty amusing, because I proposed tunneling protons in a journal club once, but got laughed down by all the physicists who said "that's silly, proton mass is too high, so probability of proton tunneling is basically zero" (they were being overconfident).
The only real work in this area, which is to say, work that is heavily backed up with data, is the work on quantum mechanisms in photosynthesis: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2010/05/10/untangling-quantum-enta... This work, since it has a huge amount of high quality experimental work, is considered pretty solid.
Also, did you push back against the committee member? Show data? At least create a plausible doubt in their mind?
The reason enzyme mechanisms are so hard to study is that getting proteins into a state where you can capture data from that femtosecond where the reaction occurs is hard. Recent improvements in free electron lasers for fourth generation synchrotrons will greatly improve this.
Iirc, given some estimate of the relative potential energy barrier formed by the hydrogen atoms, we showed that the nitrogen atom would effectively oscillate between the up and down states and calculated the frequency of oscillation.